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Hubs fitted, then wheels and car taken off stands to be put into short term storage while I work on the other cars..

Then started fixing the black roadrally car. Was originally going to be leaving this until later in the year but my roadrally navigator persuaded me to get it ready for the next event and came over to help at the weekend..

So car in garage and up on stands and checked front suspension, engine mounts, wishbones etc after our previous "off"

All looked OK so decided to fit the ZF LSD to the box..

But that was a pain as it needs the box casing modifying to allow it. A while later with a die grinder and we get this modification to allow clearance..

Then fitted the diff, refitted the sumpguard, fitted a new heater as the old one was kaput and made a new front spotlight mount to fit between the bumper holes rather than having to modify the bumper

Still got to paint front bumper, refit spots, check rear end of the car and take for a testdrive..

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Firstly, went out on the Bruce Robinson in the black car.. Couple of issues with alternator charging, topmount coming loose and picked up a penalty but managed to finish...

Then focus shifted back to the tarmac car.. Had gearlinkage to sort first..

Started by stripping the internal side of things from the car. This bracket holds the gearlever and the hydraulic handbrake.

Then measured and cut (and again and again) to fit 2 new "bulkheads" for the end of the gear cable outers. I also had to cut the existing plastic ends off the gearlever housing and convert the pins on the cross gate unit to take an m6 cup end.

Then refitted in the car. Its very snug!

Then we cracked on with making the other end (again)... This was due to the cable position changing due to my revised bracketry,..

Then it all got adjusted up properly and whilst it was tight, it is also very precise and so we refitted everything back in the car

Then we moved onto the brakes. We blew a seal in the Hispec calipers so decided to move up a spec and ended up with some CP5040 AP ones.

However I wanted them to work with the current discs I use on the other car which are 285mm modified Sierra Cosworth ones so had some brackets machined up

Got the brackets 3 days before the rally, fitted them and found that we had a bad thread in the upright caliper mounts so off came the struts and we took them to a machine shop.

2 nights before the rally, we got the struts rethreaded and refitted everything and bled everything up.

Then took it out to check everything was working.. Gear linkage was fine and brakes were fine although not fully bedded in but it was as good as we could do..

So onto the rally... Seeded 40th of 80.

Started extremely well, slippery as hell but we were 16th overall and 3rd in class (of 23 starters in our class) after the 1st stage.

Then had 2 not so good stages as we struggled to get used to the car and get grip.

But kept getting quicker. Small indescretion with a bale cracked the front number plate and bumper and we had a very close call going off into the gravel trap at redgate but managed to get it back on without damage.

Eventually finished (our main goal for the day) 18th overall, 7th in our class and 2nd FWD car so excellent result. Small things to fix this time round, want to improve the brake bias with more rear bias and maybe swap back to Mintex pads as the DS3000s were literally smoking after each stage and pedal feel started to go but awesome feeling to finish and finish well.

Now onto the next roadrally which is this coming weekend.. so cleaned the black car, modified the rear arches for clearance, spring swap and thats all that was needed..